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Safety board launches investigation of small air carriers

Abasabady pushed the throttles forward and the twin engines of his Piper PA-31 Navajo Chieftain roared, accelerating the plane down the runway and up into the cold winter sky.

On this day — Jan. 10, 2012 — Abasabady had four passengers with him on the flight operated by Keystone Air Service. Their first stop was North Spirit Lake, an aboriginal community in northern Ontario, northeast of Winnipeg.

Like so many other flights that occur daily across Canada, this one was a lifeline, linking remote communities with larger centres.

As the flight arrived over North Spirit Lake, Abasabady, 41, was told that the runway was being plowed and that he would have to delay his landing.

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But the mix of clouds and freezing temperatures produced what is known as icing conditions in the skies above the community. In aviation, ice can be a killer. As it accumulates on an aircraft, it adds weight, causes drag and disrupts the airflow over the wings, impairing the ability to create lift.

As Abasabady circled the airport for 25 minutes, his Piper aircraft accumulated “significant” amounts of ice, degrading its ability to fly. Indeed, as he made his approach to the airport, the aircraft lost flying speed, banked suddenly and crashed onto a frozen lake short of the runway. Abasabady and three passengers were killed. The fourth passenger survived but was seriously injured.

Investigators with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada cited the pilot’s inexperience as a possible factor in deciding to make an approach to the remote airport in bad weather. Though he had logged 2,400 hours, most of his flying had been in good weather on less complex aircraft.

This crash is not an isolated incident. Older planes, younger pilots and remote airports are proving to be a deadly mix in Canadian skies.

For the decade ending December 2013, 57 per cent of all commercial aviation accidents — and 63 per cent of all fatalities — have involved small air carriers such as this one, according to statistics compiled by the safety board. During that time, the country’s so-called air taxi operators suffered 485 accidents — an average of four accidents a month — that resulted in 176 deaths and 106 serious injuries. That’s far above the 49 accidents involving the country’s large airlines and 48 accidents involving commuter operations.

The board has previously flagged concerns around such operations, warning in its last annual report that Transport Canada and the industry needed to better manage the dangers.

“There is a compelling case for industry and the regulator to proactively identify hazards and manage the risks inherent in these operations,” the board said in its 2013-14 annual report.

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The safety board, alarmed by the string of crashes, has now launched a special investigation into the safety of air taxi operations. These are typically small companies operating turboprop or piston-powered aircraft carrying no more than nine passengers.

There are about 600 such companies in Canada that generally fly people to remote or smaller communities.

The safety issues investigation, expected to get underway in 2015, is much broader than a typical accident probe done by the board and will seek to identify systemic problems that are contributing to the poor safety record.

“We want to take a look at this sector of aviation and identify what are the underlining causes to that,” said Kathy Fox, chair of the Transportation Safety Board.

“We know a number of them from our investigations. Often they happen in bad weather, pilots may have less experience. They’re operating in smaller aerodromes that don’t have the same infrastructure,” Fox said.

She said the investigation will examine a series of occurrences to see if there are “common threads.”

“We want to take a look at what are the issues that are driving those accidents and those fatalities and from that we may make recommendations about how to improve the system,” Fox said in late November.

She was speaking at a news conference to announce the board’s revised list of urgent safety issues for the country’s transportation sector.

In announcing its special investigation, the board cited the North Spirit Lake crash as an example of the factors it is seeing “over and over” in accidents — issues such as pilot inexperience and insufficient training and poor decision-making, especially in bad weather.

The board’s report into the crash of a Beech King Air turboprop at Quebec City that killed two pilots and seven passengers in 2010 laid out the risks for air taxi operations, also known as “703” carriers under Transport Canada regulations.

The aircraft flown in such operations are smaller and older and are not as well as equipped as more modern commercial jets. The flying is more demanding because the flights are shorter, meaning more takeoffs and landings in a day. Because they don’t fly high, the flights are usually forced to fly in bad weather, rather than above it. And the remote airports they serve have minimal services, lacking the navigation aids and emergency services found at larger airports.

“Pilots in air taxi operations are typically less experienced, have less training, and are younger than those in other operations,” the report said.

One veteran pilot, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his current employment with a major Canadian airline, said small carriers “have a rough go.”

The pilot, who started his career flying in northern Ontario, said such operations are among the most challenging flying in Canada, especially for pilots who are typically at the start of their aviation careers and anxious to impress.

“The aircraft are smaller. They don’t necessarily have the most modern equipment on board or they don’t have autopilots. A lot of it is single-pilot,” he told the Star.

“It’s a first job. The pilots don’t want to say ‘no’ to the operator.”

Young and inexperienced, this crop of pilots can feel the pressure to perform, even when bad weather dictates they should stay on the ground. That was cited by the safety board in its probe of the North Spirit Lake crash, where it said there was well-known pressure within the company to fly.

“Management pressure to complete flights into adverse weather conditions was common knowledge among the pilot group,” the report said.

Indeed, during his training, Abasabady failed to complete a flight because of bad weather and was told by his supervisor that “senior management would not be pleased,” the board said in its accident report.

Another pressure is the paycheque. In some cases at small carriers, a portion of a pilot’s salary is based on the hours or distance they log flying, contributing pressure to complete a flight even in bad weather. The veteran pilot recalled his own experience that if bad weather prevented a landing at a destination and he had to return, he wasn’t paid for that flight.

The safety board has said that “remuneration based on miles or hours flown has a direct and negative impact on pilots’ decision making.”

Finally, this segment of commercial aviation is subject to less stringent flight and duty times, meaning the pilots can remain on duty for longer, raising the risk of fatigue-induced accidents.

“A lot of these accidents were pilot decision-making errors and in a lot of cases fatigue contributes to that. It is an issue,” the pilot told the Star.

However, the government has introduced more restrictive flight and duty times for commercial aviation operators, including the air taxi sector. Transport Canada has said the changes will have a “significant” impact on the operations of small carriers.

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